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Friday, April 3, 2015

Pat Buchanan: Diversity — or Meritocracy?

A voracious and eclectic reader, President Nixon instructed me to
send him every few weeks 10 articles he would not normally see that were
on interesting or important issues.

In 1971, I sent him an essay from The Atlantic, with reviews by Time and Newsweek, by Dr. Richard Herrnstein. My summary read:

“Basically, (Herrnstein) demonstrates that heredity, rather than
environment, determines intelligence — and that the more we proceed to
provide everyone with a ‘good environment’ the more heredity will become
the dominant factor … in their success and social standing.”

In a 1994 obituary, The New York Times wrote that Herrnstein, though
he “was often harassed … and his classes at Harvard were disrupted,”
never recanted his heresy. He wrote “I.Q. and Meritocracy” in 1973, and
in 1994 co-authored with Charles Murray the hugely controversial “The
Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.”

What brought this back was a piece buried in the “B” section of The
Washington Post about the incoming class at Thomas Jefferson High School
for Science and Technology in Fairfax County.

TJ High is an elite magnet school that admits students based on their
academic aptitude and achievement and offers “courses in differential
equations, artificial intelligence and neuroscience.”

According to the Post, 70 percent of the incoming freshmen are
Asians, the highest percentage ever for a school already 60 percent
Asian. Ten years ago, the student body was 32 percent Asian.

White students make up 29 percent of the school today, but are only
22 percent of the entering class. The class of 2019 will have 346 Asians
and 102 whites, but only 12 Hispanics and 8 blacks.

Of the 2,841 applicants for 2015, one in four Asians was admitted and
one in eight whites, but only one in 16 Hispanics and one in 25 black
students. Of low-income students, only one in 33 applicants got in.

What do these numbers tell us?

Thomas Jefferson High is a meritocracy where the ideological dictates
of “diversity” do not apply. Second, Asian students, based either on
nature or nurture, heredity or environment, or both, are, as of today,
superior in the hard sciences to other ethnic groups.

These numbers suggest that as Asian Americans rise from 5 percent of
the U.S. population to 15, they are going to dominate the elite high
schools and colleges devoted to STEM studies: science, technology,
engineering, mathematics.

And in the professions built around expertise in science and
technology, to which private and public capital will be directed, the
social standing of Asian Americans is going to rise, leaving black,
Hispanic, low-income and poor Americans further behind.

In the Post article, there is no breakdown of which Asian minorities excelled.

In international competitions among high school students, Chinese,
Koreans and Japanese are the top scorers, above Filipinos, Vietnamese
and Indonesians.

Two years ago, an activist group filed a complaint against Fairfax
County with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights
alleging that the admissions process at TJ High discriminates against
blacks, Hispanics and the poor.

But as the white share of the student body at TJ High is falling
fastest, if there is discrimination, the admissions process must be
giving an unfair break to Asians. For it is Asians who are the biggest
beneficiaries of what is going on at the school.

Why are Asian kids succeeding spectacularly?

Is it because they are naturally talented at STEM studies? Is it
because they have a better work ethic? Is it because their parents
demand they get their homework done and monitor their grades? Is it
because far fewer Asians come from broken homes?

It cannot be that Asians have been more privileged.

Chinese laborers in the Old West were terribly treated. Japanese were
excluded and put into camps during World War II. Chinese, Japanese,
Koreans, Filipinos and Vietnamese here are largely from families that
endured the hell of the Asian wars of the 20th century.

And while Fairfax County generously supports its school, it does not spend what D.C. does. And how are D.C. schools doing?

The Post reported yesterday: “Only 58 percent of D.C. students
graduate high school within four years, and only about half of students
are proficient in reading and math.”

So how is TJ High responding to its Asian problem?

Jeremy Shughart, admissions director at TJ, has a committee
“reviewing the application process to improve diversity at the school.”

Says Shughart, “The committee is looking at a variety of admissions
components and making recommendations for possible adjustments to future
admissions cycles. … (We) will continue to work on increasing diversity
at TJHSST and will continue to pursue outreach efforts to ensure
talented underrepresented populations of students with a passion for
math and science consider, apply to, and attend… Fairfax County Public
Schools believes in the value of diversity.”

That is bureaucratic gobbledygook for saying they are going to start
looking closer at the race and ethnicity of student applicants and begin
using this criteria to bring in some — and to reject others.

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